shame and humiliation were to be displayed upon the palace walls.

One peculiarity of this artist's pictures was that he used actual
goldleaf to make the high lights upon hair, leaves, and draperies. The
effect of the use of this gold was very beautiful, if unusual, and it
may have been that his apprenticeship as a goldsmith suggested to him
such a device.

Also it was he who created certain characteristics of painting that
have since been thought original with Burne-Jones. This was the use of
long stiff lily-stalks or other upright details in his compositions.
Examples of this idea, which produced so weird an effect, will be
found in his allegory of "Spring," where stiff tree-trunks form a part
of the background. In the "Madonna of the Palms" upright lily-stalks
are held in pale and trembling hands. Like Michael Angelo, who came
years afterward, Botticelli was a guest of the great Lorenzo the
"Magnificent," in Florence. It was by Botticelli's hand that the
greater painter sent a letter to Lorenzo from a duchess friend who was
also his patron. This was in Angelo's youth; in Botticelli's old age.

All his life was a drama of morbid seeking after the unattainable, and
finally he became so poor and helpless that in his old age he would
have starved had Lorenzo de' Medici not taken care of him. Lorenzo and
other friends who in spite of his gloominess admired his real piety,
gathered about him and kept him from starvation.

On his "Nativity," Botticelli wrote: "This picture I, Alessandro,
painted at the end of the year 1500 in the troubles of Italy, in the
halftime after the time, during the fulfilment of the eleventh of
John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, in the loosing the devil